Build a Sparkly Ornament Tabletop Tree

14 December 201011,605 views7 Comments

by heather

The other day, I stumbled across a new dollar store crafter, Dominique from DollarDesignsTV, and her new video series on YouTube. Dominique loves dollar store decor just as much as I do, and she agreed to create a project just for us here at Dollar Store Crafts. She came up with this amazing Super Sparkly Ornament Tree! Thanks for the guest post, Dominique, and everyone else, please go check out her videos at DollarDesignsTV!

Super SparklyOrnament Tree!

I absolutely loooooove Christmas time! There’s something about the vibrant colors, the chilly air…the fabulous décor possibilities that gets me all excited! And that’s what I wanted to capture in my decorating this year; my true love for the holiday season. And just the other day while driving home, I got the idea to create this Ornament Tree. It just hit me! Thankfully, I know where every dollar store is within a 50 mile radius of me home (kidding…kinda) so I swung by the nearest “Tree” and picked up my supplies!

Project Materials:

Ornaments (I used 3 packs of 8), $3

Garland (Rope), $1

Large Ornament (to add some pizzazz!), $1

Glue gun and glue sticks, on hand

Scissors

Bowl or circular shape to use as a guideline for the base or your tree

Total: $5

Getting started – I removed all of the “hangers” from the ornaments so I literally just used the ball part of the ornament

Using my bowl as my template, I placed the ornaments around the bowl. Then I went back and glued the ornaments (using my glue gun) to the ornament next to it (the one already glued to the others). Remove the bowl when you’re just about done with the base row, complete the row, and moved on to my next row.

On the 2nd row (and rows following) I positioned the ornaments in between the two ornaments below it (making a sort of pyramid or triangle—see picture below). Then I glued the ornament to the one next to it (like in the first row). You can also glue the ornament to the ones below it at this time but I saved that for a little later (step 4).

And basically I just worked my way up the tree repeating step 2 until I only had space for one ornament ball at the top of my tree. Make sure that the amount of ornaments you put on each row gets smaller and smaller (ex. 10 on base row, 8 on the next, 5 on the one after that…etc.). Otherwise, it won’t look like a tree! My numbers got smaller by two or three ornaments as I worked my way up.

I then went back with my glue gun securing each row to the one below it.

Next I took my garland and wrapped it in between the rows. I fitted it to the tree, cut to size, and then glued the two garland ends together. I repeated this until I got to the top of the tree (I stopped right underneath the top ornament). NOTE: I glued each row of the garland on the same side of the tree. That way when I turned it to the “front” you couldn’t see the “seams” where I had glued.

Then I took my “special” ornament and glued it to the “front” of the tree). The front of the tree is the side opposite of the side you glued your garland together on (you don’t wanna see those glued seams from the front!)

And that’s that! It was soooooo easy and took right around 30 minutes. Not bad for this Sparkly Sensation!

I made on the other day, but didn’t have the rope garland. I went and bought some so it would cover up my hot glue that oozed out a little, but I love it! I use it as our centerpiece on the kitchen table. We only had a few sparkly balls left over from dt, but my mom gave me tons of shiny ones when she moved, so ours is less sparkly and a little more on the shiny side. Thanks so much!

# 22 December 2010 at 9:25 am

Judy said:

I have tried this several times and have been unable to get this to come out right. Don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’m going to try again because I think this is so cute.